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Where research meets development: A conversation on challenges and opportunities with Audrey Nepveu and Alain Vidal

Audrey Nepveu and Alain Vidal discussing the transition from CPWF to CRP5 during the 3rd International Forum on Water and Food in Tshwane, South Africa, November 2011.

In May 2012, IFAD awarded the CGIAR
Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) a two-year grant to contribute to
improving the food security and livelihoods of poor rural communities. The IFAD
grant was an opportunity to test out CPWF’s emerging technical and
institutional innovations. CPWF would influence and collaborate with key change
agents—including IFAD field staff—in order to scale up a number of its research
innovations and findings.

From 28-29 October members of the CPWF team
will gather at IFAD headquarters to share the results and findings of their work,
including tools and approaches for improving the food security and livelihoods
of poor rural communities. Ahead of the event,
we sat down with IFAD technical advisor Audrey Nepveu (ANV) and former CPWF
Director Alain Vidal (AV) to chat about challenges and opportunities for the
research and development nexus.

Tell us a little about the grant as it was
originally conceived. In your view, what was the goal of giving this grant to
CPWF?

ANV: The idea of the grant came about when
the last reform of the CGIAR system was launched, because it signaled that the
third phase of the CGIAR Challenge Programs was not likely to happen. The Challenge
Programs were structured around three phases: the first one of creativity
(2003-2008), the second one focusing (2009-2013) and the third one capitalizing
(2014-2018). What was then at stake was to capitalize the results achieved by CPWF,
one of the successful Challenge Programs, within the compressed timeframe of
the second, and now, final, phase.

In those days, it was the beginning of the
second phase of CPWF. Hence, the idea of the grant was to work on the existing,
validated results generated by the first phase of CPWF, and capitalize them for
development practitioners to use.

AV: The words you have used for the three
phases of CPWF are interesting from a development institution’s perspective. I
am not sure I would qualify the third phase as capitalizing: we always saw it
as a phase where development partners would test, adapt and scale up our
institutional and technical innovations. It would have been more a ‘handing
over’ phase. But whatsoever you are perfectly right that because that phase
became embedded in the next round of CGIAR reform, the CGIAR Research Programs
(CRPs), we needed a mechanism to engage with IFAD early enough to ensure those
innovations would not remain on a shelf.

ANV: Yes, and CPWF had also demonstrated
its capacity to bring different people together to develop successful and
practical innovations. So another dimension of the grant to CPWF was to create
the space to explore what it takes for developers and researchers to work
together.

In what capacity was IFAD working with
CPWF, and research institutions in general, at the time?

ANV: Since 2005, IFAD had worked with CPWF
as a donor – even if a minor one in financial terms. However, beginning with
the preparation of phase 2, I believe IFAD and CPWF became real partners in the
water sector, focusing efforts on the issues that will hit practitioners in the
near future; on food security at global, basin and local levels, on the
consequences for the rural poor…

AV: What facilitated this engagement were
our shared common values of focusing on people, contributing to alleviating
poverty and diverse partnerships. We already possessed a common language and
approach to rural poverty that could help us pass the usual barriers that
partners from different horizons face when engaging with each other.

The actual implementation of the grant
varied quite a bit from what was first envisioned. Can you talk about what
changed and why?

ANV: I do not completely agree with this statement.
What happened was that we achieved a great level of flexibility in
implementation through close coordination, and activities were adapted to
explore more ways for developers/implementers to interact with researchers and
their results. And I think this was highly interesting, in particular what we
found did not work. For example, the format of events for researchers did not
work so well for developers, and efforts were undertaken to propose meetings
and events with content of direct use for developers. In a similar way,
developers also had to make efforts to slow down and listen to the new ideas
and tools proposed by researchers.

AV: Yes, I think on both sides, the
challenge was to bring both developers and researchers outside of their comfort
zones, away from their normal technical solutions and science, so as to jointly
start thinking ‘out of the box’ and figure out how innovations could make sense
and be scaled up in a given—and often different—context.

ANV: Where CPWF really surprised me though
was when they decided to modify their whole working modality to build on the
learnings from this grant: for all CPWF activities, developers and politicians
were included in the action-research process, thus speeding up and facilitating
the uptake of the results generated!

AV: Indeed, but what also changed was our
initial focus on CPWF Phase 1 results, as we progressively took on board the
results from Phase 2. We have really learnt together what research-for-development
means.

What do you see as the biggest takeaways
from this collaborative effort?

ANV: The biggest takeaway I see is in the
setup proposed by CPWF to undertake action research. This setup was
demonstrated to be of interest to donors because it delivers practical results,
useful tools and knowledge. It was a pleasure to attend CPWF fora organized
every three years and have the opportunity to meet enthusiastic yet practical,
committed researchers from a vast array of competencies. They were happy to
work together and used their critical minds to push for optimum solutions. I
would like this to be taken up by the latest CGIAR reform cycle with the CGIAR
Research Programs.

AV: The three CPWF international fora on
water and food also provided an opportunity for a broad ‘water and food’
research-for-development community—including not only researchers but also development
practitioners, decision makers and politicians—to mingle, interact, and brainstorm
ideas way beyond the classical format of a scientific conference. It also
contributed to consolidating the institutional values CPWF aimed to develop
within these communities, which are now incorporated in the principles that the
CGIAR Consortium tries to apply to its strategic partnerships and capacity
development.

ANV: Another takeaway that is not mentioned
so much can be found in the ‘basin development challenges’. In each of the six
basins where CPWF worked between 2009-2014, between one and two basin
development challenges were identified through a six-month consultative processes.
However, the funding that CPWF managed to raise in the wake of the 2008 food
crisis was only sufficient to support work on one basin development challenge
for each basin. There is still a second research question to tackle in each
basin. That could be looked into as some of these development challenges may
have become more critical in the last five years.

In what ways do you think IFAD’s
programming can benefit from tapping into research? How would IFAD staff and
research institutions have to change to strengthen the potential for future
collaborations?

AV: I see a huge potential for IFAD and its
programming to benefit from a better understanding of and engagement with CGIAR
research-for-development in general, since IFAD and CGIAR share a lot of their
values and objectives, and IFAD, unlike other lending or granting development
agencies, still has a broad set of in-house technical skills. But instead of an
ad hoc mechanism where CGIAR researchers or programs are brought on board a bit
like consultants, we could probably try to develop a mechanism where the CGIAR
pool of expertise could be brought in more systematically, especially in
countries where both institutions are focusing their efforts. I think this is
what this IFAD grant has also tried to explore, but there is still a long way
to go.

ANV: Thanks to the grant to CPWF, we did
explore what would work for IFAD to interact with the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and
Ecosystems. The Lao experience will be presented during the event. However,
it takes quite some time for IFAD and WLE to understand each other, and call on
the other at the appropriate moment in the project lifetime. I think that there
will be a need for more sharing events, and also for displaying the tools and
approaches generated by action research.

Hear more about the approaches CPWF piloted
for uniting research and development for poverty alleviation. Visit the event page
and attend the event on 28-29 October.